LOCATION: INCURSION #0032-SAHARA
AREA: THE BLACK CITY
EARTH DATE: JANUARY 1, 2032 | TIME: 1:45 PM
The gate closed, and Samir led the group away from it quickly in case anyone came looking.
They found themselves in a city that was neatly laid out, but appeared completely utilitarian.
“Reminds me of old mining towns from the 1920s,” the Healer said. He had grown up in West Virginia, where coal mining was a way of life 100 years ago.
Samir sniffed the air.
“It almost smells of oil,” he said. He shook his head. “Let’s get off the main street and have a look around.”
The street the gate entered onto ran along the length of the wall. The pavement, such as it was, was made of the same black material as just about everything else, and Samir was happy to see that it silenced their footsteps as they walked.
Plain buildings lined the other side of the street. Their simple signs were written in a script that even the System apparently couldn’t translate for them.
They found a narrower side street and took a left.
After passing by several similar industrial buildings to the ones that had lined the main street, they seemed to enter a residential area.
Rickety houses and apartments separated by only three feet of space extended along in a straight line as far as Samir could see.
“These homes look like the wind could topple them,” Drexler observed.
He was reaching out toward one when a scream erupted from further down the road.
They all entered stealth again and ran toward the screaming, which was growing more and more frantic.
On a street corner, three men wore black form-fitting uniforms. A black scarf covered their head and face. They held metal batons, and were beating a woman on the street.
She screamed in pain with each horrible blow. Samir was sure she was pleading with her life, although he couldn’t understand her words.
Dozens of people stood around, watching silently.
Nobody lifted a finger to help.
Drexler’s hands bunched into fists.
Samir tried to hold him back, but he was already too far ahead.
Before Samir could even think of a plan, Drexler appeared out of nowhere. His fist pummeled the head of one of the guards, sending the man to the ground immediately.
One of the remaining guards dropped the woman, who fell to the hard ground onto her elbow. She screamed out in pain, but onlookers rushed in to drag her away quickly.
Erik smiled as the third guard swung his baton at Erik’s head.
A split second before the baton struck, Erik disappeared. The man had put everything into his swing, and as he stumbled forward from the momentum, Erik appeared behind him.
He shoved the guard down and dropped a powerful hammer strike onto the back of the guard’s head, smashing him into the ground face first.
Erik jumped back up and spun around, just in time to take a baton to his face.
His head jerked to the side with the impact, and blood immediately began flowing from his cheek and eye.
Samir was ready to jump in, but he knew Erik would be angry if he did. Erik always liked fighting against the odds. And three against one was barely even that for the experienced brawler from Germany.
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Samir and the rest of the team stayed back and watched the scene unfold from the shadows.
Another blow to Erik’s head caused him to fall backward. He fell to the ground, his arms behind him and his legs in front.
The guard began yelling again as he stepped over Erik’s seated form.
“I don’t even know what you’re saying, so shut…”
He disappeared from view again, appearing behind the guard.
“The fuck…”
Erik grabbed the raised baton out of the guard’s hand and swung it.
Right between the guard’s legs.
“Up!”
The guard keeled over in pain. Erik finished him off with his own baton.
Erik was covered in blood and heaving with the exertion for just a moment before his Endurance caught up with him and his heart rate settled back to normal.
He dropped the baton to the ground and turned to look at the assembled group of people.
They wore all black, and the woman who had been beaten was still whimpering as a man and two women held her up.
Samir and the four others dropped stealth and appeared next to Erik.
The crowd gasped and all but the three holding up the injured woman ran, entering their homes along the road.
Samir heard the sound of locks engaging and then the street went silent.
Save for the sound of the woman crying, still in pain from multiple broken bones. Her skull was crushed on the left side, and blood flowed freely from multiple serious wounds.
The Healer stepped forward and extended his staff gently.
The woman pulled back, but Erik reached out, steadying her.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered.
White motes of light left the staff, dancing in the air for just a moment before entering the injured woman.
She immediately relaxed as her pain receptors settled. Then the nanites began working through her system repairing broken bones and closing wounds.
It took twenty minutes, and nearly drained the Healer’s staff of nanites, but by the time he was done, she was fully healed and standing on her own two feet.
An alarm blared through the city, and the woman, thankful for the aid given her, grasped Erik and the Healer’s hands, indicating they should follow.
Samir shrugged, and they followed her as she ran two blocks. The woman led them around the side of her small house and gestured to a door.
She raised a finger to her mouth, then pointed to it again.
Samir nodded, and they stayed quiet as he pulled the door open and entered the woman’s basement. The room inside was pitch black, and they couldn’t see anything.
Even with enhanced Perception, Samir couldn’t see his hand in front of his own face.
They waited there for hours, and Samir began worrying the portal might close, stranding them in this dark world, when she finally returned.
She opened the door and evening light flooded into the space.
“Please, come with me,” she whispered. “Quickly now.”
The System must have calibrated somehow, because this time when she spoke, they were all surprised that they could understand her.
They followed her into her house, and she kept the lights off. But here, moonlight filtered in through the windows and they could at least take in their surroundings.
Samir was no longer surprised to note that everything was black. The walls, the floor, all of the furniture. Which was limited to the bare essentials.
It was all so… generic. Like this could be anyone’s house. There was no personalization to the place at all.
He looked at their host, and she began speaking. Slowly at first, then picking up speed as she found her confidence to speak about things that were never openly put to words.
“They were trying to make an example of me,” she said.
Tears flowed from her eyes. On her pale skin in the near darkness of the room, it was hard to see them. But once in a while as she spoke, slivers of moonlight would illuminate the wetness on her cheeks.
“My only daughter was dying from The Illness and I was only trying to see her once more before I lost her.”
She sniffled, wiping her nose with a dusty cloth she picked up from a nearby table.
“I asked for the day off work, but they refused me. It was month-end, and we had to meet quotas.” She looked up at them, and the fierce look in her eyes even made the fearless Drexler lean backward a few inches.
“I skipped work for just one day and went to the infirmary anyway. The nurses there reported me, and those bastards showed up within minutes.”
She spat onto the floor, then moved her foot to wipe it up. It seemed even this gesture of protest in her own home should be erased.
She wiped her nose again.
“They dragged me through the streets all the way to this corner where my and my friends all live. One held me while the other two banged on doors, making sure they got as large an audience as possible.”
Samir sighed. He knew where this was going. He had traveled to places where justice there was based on rules thousands of years old. Before the System, in certain cultures they still cut off the right hand of those who were caught stealing.
It was cruel, but sometimes the cruelty was the point. It was meant as a general deterrent. It seemed some behavioral themes translated to other worlds all too well.
She continued.
“Once they got a large enough audience, they began the beating.”
She reached for Erik’s hand tentatively, and he gently cupped her small hands in his.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” she said, “I would be a bloody pulp on the street right now. They would have left me there until the feral animals came to get me.”
She sniffled again.
“And there wasn’t anything any of my neighbors and friends could have done about it.”
Finally she looked up at them, meeting each man’s gaze one by one.
“So, I’ll ask this once. Where are you from? And can you take me with you?”
Samir was about to speak when she added:
“Please. If you don’t, I will be dead by daybreak.”